There are countless mysteries in our collection, and we needed your help to solve them. Our museum service was formed over 100 years ago and since then we’ve collected, recorded and displayed thousands of objects from pottery to paintings, from shoe buckles to stuffed owls. When accepting an object there are a few things we need to think about. Have we got anything else like this? Does the object have a good local story? And so on.

Over the years and especially in the early 1900s, the story, which is key to explaining why objects have been collected, was not always recorded. This means that sometimes it can be unclear what an object is, why an object is notable or, for example, the names of people who appear in a photograph.

It’s our job to make sense of these museum mysteries. One of the ways we have done this in recent years is through tapping into community memory on social media. Campaigns on Facebook and Instagram have helped clear up some mysteries but there are plenty more we need help with. So, we invited you to look over the objects in this exhibition and think about what story each object may hold.

This exhibition was upstairs in The Arches, part of the Terrace Gallery.